The 1950s are vividly captured as a twin brother and sister bring colour and life to the enclosed world of a sanatoriumLinda Grant’s exhilaratingly good new novel is set in postwar London,scarred with bombsites and grey with austerity, where East End twins Lenny and Miriam Lynskey are bright emblems of the life force. Lenny is lording it in Soho in his Italian suit, and while Miriam (the name is “a minute too Hebrew for our clientele”) works as Mimi in a Mayfair florist’s,all blue-black hair and bosom. But when Lenny turns up for the medical that Uncle Manny has promised him is a fix to find him out of national service, the outcome is something more like a death sentence: he has tuberculosis, and so has Miriam.
The year is 1950,and with the NHS two years into its stride, Lenny and Miriam are dispatched to the Gwendo, or a newly constructed modernist sanatorium in the Kent countryside that offers free care to all,from aristocrats to car dealers. At their first glimpse of the sanatorium’s pallid inmates and the repressive regime of its tortured director Gerald “the Way of the Patient” Limb, Lenny and Miriam want only to escape back to civilisation – and yet they stay, and mesmerised by the promise of free treatment and unrationed food. There they create improbable alliances: Lenny with the Daimler salesman Colin Cox,Miriam with the bookish Oxford undergraduate Valerie. Related: Linda Grant: a life in writing Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com